


A-Courting We Will Go

by Neftzer_nettlestonenell



Series: A True Outlaw Story [9]
Category: Robin Hood (BBC 2006)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Bandits & Outlaws, Declarations Of Love, Desire, Drama, Drama & Romance, Espionage, F/M, Pursing Happiness Through Allan-centric Fic, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-14
Updated: 2018-02-14
Packaged: 2019-03-18 11:20:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 10,459
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13680645
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Neftzer_nettlestonenell/pseuds/Neftzer_nettlestonenell
Summary: A story of Allan-A-Dale and Nell of Nettlestone. Set during the earliest days in the reign of King John's nine-year-old son Henry III, still a child at his father's unexpected death.Another change of rulers and regimes again throws the Sherwood gang (their status as outlaws and their very existence) into potential uproar. And spies come out of retirement--and out of the woodwork.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sylvi10](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=sylvi10).



**A.D. 1216 - Nottingham Town - The Bell Inn -**   _A lay was a lay_ , he reasoned to himself.  _Skin was skin_. In such things, more or less--leaving room for differences in style and expertise (and perhaps, personal taste)--all humanity was equal, right? This girl, that girl; this tavern, that inn--as good as any other to get the job done.

Allan-A-Dale lay, his twenty minutes not yet elapsed (well, alright, then,  _mostly_  lapsed--but Jennie was insensible to the passage of time, asleep beside him, and Hobert had not yet arrived to roust him out of the room or demand additional payment), the late afternoon sun now finding it harder to penetrate into the dim second floor room of the inn, but still leaving plenty of light for him to take in his familiar (if disinteresting to him at present) surroundings.

There was brunette Jennie, asleep on her stomach, still dressed, her present position concealing the unlaced front of her work-a-day frock. Certainly it was far from usual that at the present moment in their appointment that he would not only be wakeful but that he would also be propped up at the bed's head onto one of the two rather sorry excuses (even to a forest-dwelling outlaw) for pillows.

Jennie was a sweet sort of a girl, who was perhaps given to giggling overmuch, a consequence of her young age and relative lack of sophistication (even for a Nottinghamshire lass), but she was pretty enough--and game enough--to inspire him to have sought out her particular company on more than one occasion.

Still, he had found himself noticing that her eyes lacked any spark, any understanding or curiosity when he had shown her his newest tavern-ready grifter's gag. Simply, she was charmed--like an un-complicated child--at the 'magic' (which he would rather have had her recognize as practiced sleight-of-hand) he had caused to take place before her eyes.

He could regale her with tale upon tale of ways he had escaped from several Nottingham sheriffs over the years, swindled noblemen, waylaid monies in the Forest. And still, she would listen with pleased--but un-examined--delight.

In so closely mulling over this, Allan found himself becoming fearful that he had (when he had not been looking) grown into a man where it was no longer enough to simply be revered, to amaze and garner admirers. That he had begun to find himself in need of someone who might share his technical enjoyment of the feats laid to his name, someone whose mind might spark with interest (and a level of understanding) at some of the marvels he'd--and the gang'd--pulled off. More a true partner--or peer--than another mere chippy-of-the-week with another set of pretty eyes to moon over him, another set of tits and hips for him to moon over.

Perhaps it had not at all been a lay he had been looking for. ( _Blimey, could that be true--of him?_) Perhaps what he wanted might have been better sought out among those in the tavern below--companionship, camaraderie--some level of equality, some 'meeting of the minds' as he had heard Much once refer to such a notion.

Allan cast a look back over to Jennie, her ceiling-ward rump bringing his mind momentarily back to what had brought him (and his coin) to the Bell this day. 

_Nah_ , he reassured himself, a disinteresting lay was just...just that. A fluke. No reason to go all introspective on himself. Bound to happen some time or another--a lessening interest (for the moment, of course-- _only_  for the moment) in the opposite sex.

 

* * *

 

Still, once back at camp, he did search out a moment to pull Robin aside, bend his ear a bit.

"So. What'd'ye think it means?" Allan had asked, his voice lowered as though he were sharing some terribly, important secret. "Did you ever find yourself--?"

Robin seemed to consider a moment before answering. "You're saying that you couldn't--?" 

He had taken Allan's question and explanation of his problem entirely wrong.

"No!" Allan answered very sharply, putting a swift end to the misunderstanding. "' _Course_  I could--no problem with the ol' A-Dale timber. Only...it wasn't enough, somehow. It was like--like eating a good, hearty venison for supper, and at the end of it still finding yourself hungry."

Robin's brow twisted in thought. "But not just so that you wanted more of what you'd just had?"

Allan nodded in strong agreement. "Right."

Before speaking further, Robin threw a glance over his shoulder, in the direction of where his wife of several years now, Lady Marian, would be in relation to where he and Allan had found to step away to. He raised his hand and brought it to rest, clapping it upon Allan's shoulder as might presage a confidence. "What you've run into, my friend, is dangerous territory."

In response, Allan's eyes opened wider, his brows lifted from their usual, unflappable resting place. "Yeah?"

Robin shook his head. "Your appetite's changed. And the old...A-Dale timber," Robin gave a slight smirk at the reference, and his eyes crinkled, "seems to find itself in want of a little something more than a passing poke."

Allan's expression turned suspicious. "And why should it do that?"

"Ask John if you like," Robin encouraged him with a shallow shrug, "or even Will--it comes to all at a different time, but I'd say it's a pretty strong signal that you might want to set your sights on something a bit more than ships passing in the night--or the late afternoon at the Trip. 'Time you found someone you not only would like to lay down  _with_  at night, but also wake up  _to_  come a morning."

"G'won now," Allan tried to protest, though he had had to admit (if only to himself) that there was something to Robin's diagnosis.

"But such pursuits will have to wait, I'm afraid," Robin re-clapped his friend's shoulder, his face changing away from the larkish expression it had worn, "for I've need of you to travel to the new King's Court on my--on  _all_  our--behalf, and nose about discreetly until you can bring us reliable news of how our situation--and the present situation of all Nottinghamshire--will be dealt with by the new Court. Whether John's advisors--who have surely ingratiated themselves to retain their employment, positions and power with John's young son--will keep faith with the line of the dead monarch they once served, or carve out a new plan for governing the people--and the many wrongly outlawed among them."

"Right," Allan needed no pause to think Robin's mission for him over. "And how shall I do that?"

"Under the guise of the widowed Lord Evermoor's seneschal, traveling to Court on matters of market prices and the names and families of marriageable young noblewomen."

At this--the notion of him as any sort of matchmaker, no matter how docile--Allan could not hold back a smirk. "And when shall I leave?"

"As soon as ever you may make your farewells."

 

* * *

 

**Somewhere along the London Road -**  The day was warmer than she would have preferred it to be, when riding in a hay cart was necessary. The hay itched and bothered at her eyes and nose, and even gave her incremental, irritating cuts on her exposed skin. And the road to London seemed like it would never, ever end.

In the light of the strong sun there was little to do as she sat backwards, facing the retreating road but daydream, which she had long known herself to have a talent to do, near to the point of drowsing--but not quite.

She let herself collapse back onto the hay, let the strong sun score into the back of her eyelids, and before long she was somewhere else. Not exactly earthbound, but neither floating untethered above it. Wandering, she would have told anyone who asked, wandering without having to use her feet in the journey.

She imagined away the hay, imagined away the jolt of the rugged hay cart until it was naught but a gentle swaying motion. Imagined away the old carter holding the lone horse's reins.

She felt the sun's warmth--imagined away the unpleasant heat of it--opened herself up to it until it was more like the touch, the caress, of smooth hands upon her. She stretched, telling herself the scratch of the hay against her cheek was really the unexpected softness of an only half-full beard. 

_No, wait_. She had not meant the beard to be ginger-dark.  _No. No. No_. 

_Saxon blonde_ , she thought.  _Better_. 

And perhaps it was rough--as most beards looked. Even stubbly. The jaw it occupied square, dependable.

Lost in her reverie, her own hand found its way onto the half-shiny fabric of the borrowed gown she wore, her fingertips sliding along the cloth's rich, persimmon-colored sheen, enjoying the sensation. 'Nell, my girl.  _Love_ ,' she heard a long-remembered, lost voice say.

And that was it. Without further attempt at distracting herself she re-righted her body among the hay, sitting upright in the cart.

It was only that she was at present on a job for the Lady Marian that his voice, his beard-- _damn_ , she thought--even his hands-- _they had been his hands, uncallused as only a con man's might be_\--had come to her mind and gate-crashed her daydream. Yes, gate-crashing was of certain an A-Dale sort of thing to do.

She had found--earlier in her tedious journey--that flicking the uneven edges of the large wax seal on the papers Lady Marian had given her to complete her disguise was a very fine way of combating annoyance and stress. So, flick at it she did.

 

* * *

 

Nell saw the figure on horseback--the sun behind the rider and his mount--some time before they were close enough on the road for her to clearly see more than their dark silhouette.

In her mind she preemptively went over the cover story she had been given. She was a chambermaid, sent by Lord and Lady Brandemere of Nottinghamshire as a gift to the household of the new king. Within the papers Lady Marian had forged for her were an impressively faked vouching of the position she had (not) held in the Brandemere household, remarks and proofs of her own (fictional) excellent character and (nonexistent) personal, maidenly commitment to chaste and sober living.

The frock she now wore was meant to be both pretty enough to get her passed through to the inner bailey of the royal castle, as well as rich enough to show that she had worked in a wealthy and large country shire household, and would know how to comport herself within the King's castle.

In this way, Lady Marian thought that she, through Nell, might best have a chance to spy on and suss out the thoughts and feelings of the new king and his administration about the people of Nottinghamshire and the outlaws within it-- _particularly_ once-landed, now exiled outlaws to whom the Lady Marian was at present wed.

 

* * *

 

The horse and rider caught up with the hay cart (the horse more than willing to slow to a walk alongside it, as long as he were permitted to munch on its contents).

Nell could see the large, Crusader's broadsword--and two other shorter swords--strapped by their scabbards to the ornate and masterfully-crafted saddle.

"You are a very pretty sight on such a day," the rider said, looking down at her where she sat, the sun rendering his Saxon blonde hair into something akin to a nimbus.

She knew enough of her own value (physical and otherwise) and her own shortcomings (physical and otherwise) to take such unrequested cheek with a grain of salt. "And you are a knight traveling with neither entourage nor squire. Can you assure me that I--and this lowly hay cart--will be quite safe from you, Sir?"

The Crusader smiled at her, letting his free hand come to rest comfortably on the hilt of his sword. "You have nothing to fear, Mistress--" he gave her the title of a married woman, though she at present avoided its usage. "I am but Sir Carter, bound for London and for Court--where my squire awaits me. And I am weary of solitude on my journey. And would gladly pass some of it in your sharp-eyed company."

Ever hoping to play the advantage, Nell looked up at him through her lashes. "A mere chambermaid headed to Court as a gift from her master and mistress is hardly in a position to refuse such an agreeable offer." She smiled, hoping there was no stray hay comically affixed at present to her hair.

Carter took a second appraisal of the woman seated among the hay below him. She said the right things, surely, that any chambermaid might--though there was something far too fetching about her presence for him to believe any master would have willingly sent her away--but even as she spoke words meant to be demur, he seemed to sense an interesting challenge rising behind them, not merely of the possibility of future carnal games in its nature. Rather, sparking with an energy one usually witnessed among rightfully-cocky outlaws, ever at testing a man's true loyalty, a man's true nature.

Certainly it was an uncommon thing to stumble upon out on the London road.

He considered. Perhaps  _she_  was his answer--the second half still necessary to be located in his planned web of Court intrigue. Only time would tell. And until they arrived in London Town, time was something they would have plenty of (and inns and long stretches of road at which to spend it). 

Of course he would have to purchase her her own mount before they got too much closer to Court, and a slightly nicer frock--or bliaut to cover the one she wore--very well, several nice frocks, and dress her with a bit of the family jewelry he had brought with him. Yes, he would have to do so. Certainly, no one at Court--not even the lowliest stable boy--would believe her for a decorated knight's courtesan if he did not.

 

* * *

 

**London - Chapel in the King's castle -**  What else was she supposed to think about? Surely she could not simply concentrate on the illogical absurdity of allowing a woman known for a knight's doxy to mingle with the upper Court, yet expecting her to (along with the rest of the Court) faithfully attend Mass.

Mass, Nell supposed (though she had little experience with such a grand rendering of it), was meant as a time for reflection. And so, she reflected.

Once Sir Carter had set his mind to mirroring the pace of the hay cart, certainly she had found far fewer reasons to invoke daydreaming. And once, several days later, when he asked her to accompany him to a certain inn's barn, she had not needed to pause and mull over such an obvious request.

That once there their tryst had not turned to a physical one was not something mourned or examined for long. He had proposed a scheme to her: a horse of her own if she would rebel against being sent to Court by her master as a mere chambermaid, and instead present herself as a second in  _his_  party, and, in fact, his mistress.

But then, interestingly, not only his mistress, but also his spy. As, he confessed--perhaps a bit too easily to her to gain her grifter's respect-- _he_  was a spy, a knight bound for Court to suss out what the new government of nine-year-old Henry's brought with it--for Carter's lands and his friends.

Seeing that she could easily spy for both this man offering her equine compensation when their stint at Court was done--as well as for the Lady Marian--Nell readily agreed to the new plan. She had not much fancied emptying chamber pots of a morning and being chased around beds by Lord This or Lord That too old and too ugly to set their sights upon any woman higher than the hardly-allowed-to-refuse castle staff.

It was a mere tertiary consideration when he mentioned that--unless he had her consent--the true letter of her new title 'courtesan' need not be brought to bear. So he had read Lady Marian's faked references after all, she then knew. And apparently felt that had he expected her willing and frequent physical capitulation into their bargain as well that she would have refused him outright.

It was odd to find herself with a partner--much less a male one  _not_  sharing her bed. But Carter was an exciting man to spend time with, and her job at the Court (now that it had been dragged out of the serving ranks) was certainly fully engaging.

Attending a Mass once in the course of several days was, after all, hardly akin to being chained in the Sheriff of Nottingham's dungeon.

 

* * *

 

It would have killed the lads dead with laughter to see him--to catch him out--here. Attending Mass. No doubt others in the Court took him for rather devout. In general it was a holy occasion attended more faithfully by the ladies of the Court (perhaps at some royal dictate, perhaps out of boredom, or fear for whatever sins they might have committed).

He had not arrived at the new king's Court so very long ago, but he had a theory he was testing--that when the men of the Court arrived to attend that there might be something in their faces, in their demeanor, that he might understand, might exploit in his mission. Something that might unravel their true characters to him. So Allan-A-Dale, as Lord Evermoor's seneschal, came to Mass. And studied those around him.

The cup and the wafer were being offered now, the congregants going up to the altar to receive the elements row by row. As usual he was in the rear of the chapel, the better to see.

Several rows ahead of him a line of castle ladies had walked forward to take part, their hips fetchingly girdled in such a way that the mind struggled to focus on things either intrigue-based or holy.

As they were now walking back to their row, the head-on view of those same girdles still did much to tempt the mind, despite his best efforts.

He had a moment when he thought he might sneeze, but the sensation for that sneeze queerly began far up, almost where his nose met with his brow. He looked up, away from the girdles, only to find himself face-to-face with--of all people in the kingdom entire--Nell, said to be of Nettlestone, unbeknownst to her (as far as he knew) widow of Wynrick the dye seller.  _His_  Nell.

She did not see him, she did not take note of his presence, but in his recognition of her he was beyond any doubt. Unlike the other ladies about her, her barley-bree hair was covered by no wimple or coif, her eyes colored green as the peapod cloth of her frock.

What she was doing here, a Nottinghamshire thief who wore the slavery brand of the Sheriff's Treeton Camp, among Court ladies, wearing Court-appropriate finery--he did not immediately know, though he meant to find out. 

Allan-A-Dale smiled, hardly a pious gesture or acceptable response to the service in progress.  _Old Henry's liver_ , but he hoped it was a fascinating, cracking good long story, too. And that she would take the time to tell it to him every last bit.


	2. Chapter 2

Allan-A-Dale stood outside the rooms of the woman he knew as Nell, that he had discovered was using the alias Arabel while at Court. He had been told by kitchen staff she was known for all as a certain knight's paramour, though he had run into trouble easily getting said knight's name out of anyone. A young porter had thought he recalled it as Carver, but before Allan could search any longer and be sure, having gotten the location of Nell's room, he had given up on his questions, and gotten himself to that particular stone passageway. Rather,  _this_  particular stone passageway.

He knew he could pause for no more than seconds here in the ladies' wing of chambers, lest he be sighted slipping into her chamber and have the castle guard brought down on him.

 

* * *

  


"Allan!" Djaq had said to him impatiently, "if you ask me one more question about where to find specific ingredients needed in curatives, or the best way to heal a scalded tongue, I will demand you leave me alone! Straightaway."

"Why, then? I'm only tryin' to make conversation."

She looked up from her mortar and pestle and her perceptive eyes searched into his own. " _Because_  you do not  _care_! You are only speaking about such things to keep yourself from speaking on what you truly wish to know!" 

She shook her head as if to try and clear it from the complex haze of double-think his mind was bringing to their dialogue.

"Well," he looked at her in challenge, "if you're so smart Mistress Scarlet,  _do_  tell us wot it is!"

She put on a heavy sigh. "Very well, it is about the girl. About Nell."

He scoffed. "Don't be silly. That's been ages ago. None of us've seen her since."

Djaq shot him a long, level look. "Get out," she told him, though this patch of forest was as much his as hers. "Shoo." Her eyes grew large with their emphasis. " _Leave_."

"Alright! Alright!" he capitulated to her, thankful there was at present no one else around. "I haven't got a question, really. Only...oh, why would she do that, d'you suppose? Why speak words I had said to her when she chose not to slit her bastard husband's belly wide open?"

Djaq's face reacted to this heretofore-unknown information. " _You_  were the one who told her that forgiveness was the only way to live? That was  _you_?" Her face shone with a pride usually only seen in a parent's expression. Her smile showed no teeth, but was no less beaming.

Looking away, uncomfortable at the sight of her reaction, Allan used the toe of his boot to shuffle and dig among the forest's leaf-mulchy earth. "Yeah, well, yes," he gave a one-shouldered shrug. "'Said it to her...once. Long ago."

Djaq considered her friend, considered the woman she had encountered only briefly--and not well. "I think for a person to recall such a thing after a long time, is to know that somehow it was important to them. Visceral." She took her hand holding the pestle and patted the heel of it against her heart. "Either to hear it from you...or to learn it for themselves." She gave a slight shrug. "Or, both."

A pause stretched between the two of them before he broke it. "See, if she hadn't said that--if she had said something else,  _done_  something else--I could've gone after her. I could've..."

"Yes," Djaq nodded, speaking slowly with the dawning of understanding. "I see that." She added, "Will has often wondered."

"Yeah, well, he would, wouldn't he?" Allan had asked rhetorically, knowing he, himself, had wasted entire afternoons in similar wonderings.

 

* * *

  


Post-Mass, Nell had managed to get free of the gaggle (that was how she thought of them, anyway--the constant clutch of females that traveled from place to place in the castle, never deserting any one of their number to time alone) to which she so often seemed to be assigned at Court.

Even as a known courtesan, it seemed, even  _she_  was to be allotted time on her own only in the acceptable evening hours--the time (she had to assume) nobility set aside for carnal wickedness.

But her wickedness here had been of an entirely other kind up 'til now. Spying, eavesdropping, a leading question here, a search of someone's room or private belongings there. And Sir Carter so often off on his own mission of statecraft and political intrigue. Hunts, councils, two tournaments, countless knights-only feasts. Not so tonight, he had told her. Not so.

"Nell," he had said, using something other than her agreed-upon alias Arabel, "I know our agreement does not extend to this, but--this afternoon, and this evening...will you let me come to you, in your chamber?"

"Where you will hope to find...entertainment?" she had asked, keeping her voice low, though they appeared to be alone in an alcove meant for just such clandestine meetings off the main hallway.

At her teasingly encouraging response to his question, he took the liberty of placing his hand under her chin, thumb to the front, his other hand where her neck met its nape, and tilted her face back so that he could kiss her.

It proved to be a swoony sort of kiss. The kind with which she in general had no experience. 

Perhaps this was how the nobility went about such things</i>, she thought,  _a troubadour's love poem sprung to life_.

She thought on it. There was no urgency in his half of the kiss, no impatient passion that she could sense. But there was a yearning, which in her ignorance of such things she chose to chalk up to being something of whatever approximated knightly desire.

Carter was handsome. He was clean. He was interesting to be around. She was not...unaffected by him.

"The door will be open," she had promised him, finding herself rather antsy with her own impatience to learn what (and how) a landed nobleman who kissed in such a way might make of the (available to even commoners and peasants) act of copulation.

 

* * *

  


Nell entered her designated bedchamber to find that the castle maids, knowing she always returned to her rooms after Mass, had lit two of several candles located about the room for light. She did not care to call for servants to help her with her clothes--an unfortunate imposition of castle life--but she had found, rather disappointingly, that the majority of the clothes Sir Carter had procured for her could be gotten off no other way than with several other hands' assistance.

She was, at least, able to undo the cording of her soft shoes without help, and so she sat herself down, and did so. Were her feet, she wondered, growing accustomed to soft leather against their village-ground callused soles? Accustomed to luxurious ribboned lacings woven three-quarters of the way up her calf? Would they miss the trappings of such richness when this lark was over? Like them, might she find it harder to come back, to settle in to old times, to real life?

At the removing of her shoes she came to feel, more than see, that something of the aura of the room had changed since last she had occupied it. She was not immediately sure if she were found out for a spy, if Sir Carter had arrived early, or if a lazy chambermaid had merely fallen asleep upon her bed. Only, something was altered.

Shoeless, she approached the arched opening that held her bed. Candlelight spilled from the opening into the sitting room she stood within, so that when she was even with the keystone she had no trouble sighting him where he was at sitting nearby the bed. Then, he had not been trying to conceal himself.

"Of course," she announced aloud, the usual cynicism-for-the-subject in her tone. "Hood must have  _his_  spy here, too."

Allan-A-Dale rocketed up out of the chair he had been occupying, and onto his feet. He had not made plans for what to say when Nell arrived. He regretted this now. "Naw," he denied her accusation, protesting with a half-shaking of his head. "'Not here on Robin's business."

Her eyebrow shot up in dispute of this claim.

"That is, I am not  _here_ ," he looked to the flagstone floor, noting her feet were bare, "on Robin's business."

She looked a good half-way to exquisite in the green-as-early-winter-peas frock that contained her. It must have been picked out for her especially, he thought--else there was no other way to reconcile the choosing of such a color, excepting what it did for both her eyes and skin. 

The neckline was wide and embellished, stretching from the meeting of one shoulder-to-collarbone to the other, sitting on her back just above where her shoulder blades began, the hips cinched tautly into hiding none of their alluring shape--the pertness of the bum--by a lengthy stretch of looped lacings running down its back.

Like those of all Court ladies--ladies of leisure--the sleeves were ostentatiously belled at the ends, ridiculously flared to make any task beyond tedious needlework all but impossible to attempt without catching them on something.

She wore three rings upon each hand, and a green agate stone on a lavaliere woven into her hair at the crown like a coronet, lying just below her hairline.

 _Green, the color of jealousy. Of lust._  

In those first seconds of seeing her;  _oh_ , how he felt it. 

 

* * *

  


She did not like seeing him, did not like finding him here. She did not like him standing so near to what had become her bed--become her room, her space. 

She did not like to be confronted with Allan-A-Dale when she was shortly set to entertain a knight of good birth in these rooms. A man that could be depended upon not to overstay his limited welcome, and certain not to suddenly turn up when both inconvenient and least expected.

She did not like the sort of problematic memento mori that Allan-A-Dale had somehow come to represent to her--a reminder of a death of sorts (perhaps yet coming, perhaps unavoidable, already long gone), a death of untethered self-sufficiency, of utter freedom and lack of significant connection to another, of  _un_ belonging. Allan-A-Dale as a symbol of impending change, of the acknowledgment of her need. (And therefore of her present lack.)

And she did  _not_  like that when she looked at this Allan-A-Dale something of the bodily shaking she had fought against so hard those years ago in Sherwood Forest when last she saw him seemed to have re-infused her dependable lower limbs.

 

* * *

  


As Nell offered him no additional greeting (assuming that boldly accusing him of being Hood's spy was any greeting at all to begin with), Allan soldiered on through a growing-thick tongue, thoughts of one-thousand entirely wrong things to say presenting themselves to him. 

"I have wanted to see you, Nell," was all that he was left with.

Her mouth opened against her will--so much energy she was expending on keeping her trembling legs still--and she spoke, "I have dreamt of you," before she could stopper it. She nearly brought her hand up in reaction to clap over it.

"Were they pleasant dreams, then?" he asked, sincerely wanting to know, a look of familiar self-confidence returning, starting to flirt about his face at the news.

"No," she told him, foggily, "they were...they were..."

As she struggled to categorize them, he seized upon her inaction, (action ever more his strong suit than words) and covered the short distance of the bed's length toward her. The space between her upper lip and nose had begun to flatten in her concentrated, but disconcerted, inability to classify her dreams. Unable to contain himself--never very good at disciplining his hands when they truly wanted, truly itched for something--he brought the pad of his left thumb (the less-used, and therefore more sensitive, one) up to stroke it along the angle of her upper lip.

Other than her eyes locking with his, she did not react.

"Do you dream of Wynrick?" he asked about her husband, softly curious, no stranger to the haunts of dreams. "Of that day?" His right eye narrowed slightly in the corner as he waited for an answer, his thumb still at its caress and exploration of her outer mouth.

Her husband's name (usually he would have been able to see that so clearly) had been the wrong thing to say.

She grabbed for his hand, pushed it back from her face, thrusting it away from her, toward his chest. "Reckon John Little told you, did he?" she countered, an infusion of that long ago wildness pouring into her. "It was not  _you_  that stayed my hand from killing him."

"No," Allan agreed, nearly stumbling backward with surprise at the level of fury the thought of that time could still bring to a boil inside of her, surprise at the abrupt return of his tenderly offered hand. His own brow furrowed as he confessed, thinking back to that day. "I think I might have killed him--if you hadn't."

Her wild-spinning eyes called themselves into check for a moment at this, Allan-A-Dale saying he might have killed her worse-than-no-good husband. Without even knowing the reasons--the facts--Wynrick deserved such.

"But as it stands," Allan continued, with a vocal shrug, "'twas a job left to John, and Wynrick of Nettlestone is dead."

Nell had known this, of course, Lady Marian had told her as much. But there was no need for A-Dale to know that. (Or to know anything of her covert arrangement with the Lady. Or Marian's private business.) "And you are here," Nell asked him, bitter (and something else she would not allow herself to name) again stinging her tongue, " _what_ , to bring this news and claim the widow as trophy for your part in things?" 

It had come out too quickly, her tongue too concerned with searing repartee to concentrate on sincerity, or accuracy. She knew it for wrong, for unfair and reactionary before the echo of it had died away from the room.

She saw his shoulders incrementally fall, saw that her spiteful remark had begun to take the stuffing out of him. 

To see such did not make her feel good. Rather, she felt a bully--and one that had stooped to hitting below the belt.

"That...does not sound of Nell," he said, haltingly, and she could further see that her tone and presumption of his motives had not only managed to subdue, but also to cut at him.

"Yes, well," she made an effort, but only managed to modulate to petulant, "there are many sides to a girl--though most men, and A-Dales, I do not doubt, are only interested in one."

He exhaled in disappointment and half-pleaded with her. "You told him that you forgave him. That it was the only way to live."

She scoffed and attempted to play it off, those words of his shared long ago that had leapt to her lips that day. "No doubt I was remembering a line from some hack's play I had seen at some faire or another." She could not seem to find her way out the corner her cutting remarks had backed her into.

Allan held his palms up in supplication. "I wanted to come after you."

She was all-over painted with suspicion. "What,  _after_  you were told?"

He protested as though dancing shoeless away from hot coals before being scalded. "No. Before.  _Before_!"

Her next words came out less frantically, less fearsomely, than they had the last time he had heard them, had them seared into his memory. "I do not belong to you, Allan-A-Dale."

He let a pause occur, hoping to allow for some her of fire to ebb, and took the most soundless deep breath he possibly could. Certainly it was not good to let on how monumental a thing he was about to articulate. He shook his head lightly as he answered her now learnt-by-heart warning. He willed himself to drop any degree of artifice, of grifter's craft, he might unconsciously be making use of at the moment. It was important  _these_  words be heard as authentic, be heard for what they were--not the easy-swindle (which she would see-through) that his talent could misleadingly surround them with. "That does not mean," he told her, "that we do not belong together."

Unexpectedly startled by his conviction--his lack of pretense--her eyes caught on to something playing about the corner of his, something unexpectedly neither light-hearted, nor shallow in its depths. She gave no reply, but studied the expression of his face more closely. The sideline of his nose where it met with the flat front of his cheek, the corner of his mouth that tended to pull higher than the other, the ginger-dark version of a half-beard; not entirely dandified in its upkeep, but hardly a common woodcutter's convenience.

As she did this, his hand found its way again to her lip, his thumb comfortably fitting in the pillowed groove there, and then slipping back to where it could trace at the outer curve of her ear. He brought his forehead down to touch hers, barely below the hanging green agate stone, their eyes so close in the looking that it was nearly uncomfortable. And impossible to look away from, short of closing them altogether. 

"Nell," he asked her, using language to which he was almost a stranger, "make love with me." 

He saw the grown-wide-with-interest pupils of her eyes contract, receding from the held-breath moment they two had entered, from the passion flush he did not think he had only imagined coming up upon her skin.

"'Make love' with you?" she scoffed at his choice of words, pulling her forehead clear of touching with his, tugging (with disillusionment, though he could not read it as such) at the lavaliere to free it from her hair, and snidely offering a variety of more colorful and less intimate phrases for the act he suggested. "Play pig in a poke? Hide the Yule log? Bury the bone? Better, less fancied-up words for same," she took him to task. "Have you somehow become too good for them now? Or do you imagine that I have?"

He allowed his head to remain bowed, his eyes closing for a moment in disappointment, in defeat. Naturally this was what he could expect for attempting something genuine, something true: harsh, unqualified rejection.

"I'm not some shrinking Court maiden, Allan-A-Dale," she told him off, all but wagging her finger at him. She had become more incredulous, less infuriated. "Do you think to flatter me by pretending to treat me as such? To gull me into being tumbled by you? Or are you determined to simply make sport of me?" Levelly she added, "For two can play at that game."

He hated that she had worried away at him to the point of his near-shouting. "I said it because it was what I  _meant_." He tried again, swallowing back the volume of the shout, "What I wanted. No games, Love, no--white-washing. I'm not exactly a knocking-kneed youth on the matter--as the former Lady Ophenea can well attest." As he referenced their past bedchamber encounter, he wandered away from her, over to sit heavily on the bed in near-defeat as he struggled to find the words to say--true words--that would not, perhaps, sound so much of bollocks to her.

Nell watched Allan finish deflating before her eyes, knowing it was on her account that he reacted so, and seeing in this that he had meant what he said. That he had chosen just that phrase not to humiliate or to attempt slickly seducing her, but because they were the words that best expressed something of what had brought him here.

Brought  _them_  here, she thought. For she understood that they were here, together, standing in the--for lack of a better word--mess they had made, trying to sort it. 

For the first time since the day she had walked away from Wynrick in the forest, she let herself name what it was that existed like a faery glamor fractured and gone awry between her and this outlaw of Hood's.  _Fear_ , her mother would have called it.  _Panic_ , Nell would say, and dread of what seemed destined to become of it. 

She had not known--until that day in the greenwood--how deeply she had let this thief affect her--until  _his_  words came to her mouth in the 'til-then most important moment of decision of her life. And at that she had run away as though both her life and liberty depended upon it, rather than consciously examine what such an occurrence might portend.

As she had run after her mother's death. 'Kept on the move' she had liked to think of it. As her milk-sweet, once-beautiful mother had laid dying, Nell had asked her about love, about what she was to make of her mother's choices--the loves of her life; plentiful, few of them seeming well-chosen to an outsider. Even to her own daughter.

"Perhaps it is because I see the truth in them," her mother had suggested, "even when it is not a pleasant one--and I love them for it." She was nearing her end, and grabbed for Nell's hand. For a moment her smile utterly belied the pain that had gripped her during her last days. "Find yourself someone, Nelly," she encouraged her daughter. "Someone whose truth you can see. Learn to face it. Help them to do the same."

 

* * *

  


"'Make love'," Allan said the phrase again, as if trying to get back his bearings. "Haven't you ever wondered--ever wanted to know--what that might be like? To be at  _making_  something? Not simply...having it off, you know?"

Nell closed her eyes, and lifted her brows. The remembered image that came to her would have only minutes ago sent her flying from the chamber: this man's eyes, shallow as a baptismal font, the truth she had located within them like something holy, set apart--yet utterly ephemeral.  _Beautiful. True_. 

Perhaps, if she would let it be, transformative.

 _Saint Gemma of the Blessed Lake_ , but she saw herself, as if from a great distance off, saw the precipice upon which she stood--this precipice of her and Allan-A-Dale's making. Nell could all but feel the wind against her face from where it whistled along the high sides of the seemingly bottomless chasm below. 

 _What to do?_  Step carefully back and away, throw him out of the rooms--proceed to prepare for Sir Carter's impending visit? She did think if she told him to, in this moment, A-Dale would actually go. Or, should she instead throw herself into the wind, into the depth of the unknown with which she was confronted?

She opened her eyes. "Why me?" she asked him, as though leaning slightly forward, over the drop-off, testing it out, tempting gravity.

His head came up, the first half of the action done rather quickly, before he regained some of his usual self-possession. "Because there's summat between us," he answered, half-cagily at this point.

"And wot makes you  _think_  that?" she only managed to accomplish sounding  _half_ -skeptical.

 _Because I have a tell_ , he recited internally the list he had compiled in his mind,  _fleeting as hummingbird's heartbeat, shallow as faery's footprint_. He could not quite gauge if he had worn out his chance here.  _Because you are the first person in the entire world I want to look up and see in the Sheriff's dungeon_. He could sense that she was listening, even as he let the silence between them drag on without his answering right away.  _Because I would gladly steal the Hathersage Ruby at great personal risk_ \--he wanted this--them, her--as much as he had wanted anything ever in his life-- _and then give it up to you to do with as you pleased_.

Nell stood, waiting for, expecting his response. He would have preferred she be close to him--close as an embrace--when he would speak the end of his listing aloud. He knew he was not eloquent--no rousing, persuasive speech-giver as was Robin--and he had deliberately handicapped himself by shunning the use of his talent for pulling off a good hoodwinking. So it was really only him, speaking to her across an open space, no warm neck or other body part to hide behind, to mumble it into, hoping his words, his reasoning, might sound better--less clumsy--against warm, titillated flesh.

"Because once you were just Nell," he told her, finally speaking aloud, "kissing Allan, and I can't forget that moment. But most of all because of one true thing that you've shown to me of yourself over and over, wot I cannot seem to name, 'cause my mind's no words with which to understand it."

She watched him as he spoke, and even before, as he had run through the catalog of reasons he had left unsaid. 

As though she had understood what he had been about, interpreting his silence, she answered him, enlarging his list. "Because I think about you when you are not around," she added, her posture losing the power it had found in her anger, her opposition of him. "Because the Sheriff's Mark on my shoulder no longer immediately calls to mind the pain and suffering it has for so long brought me. Because," and she half-cracked a smile, "I have found it so desperately  _hard_  to disappear and start over in a place free of A-Dales." She finished in something just above a whisper. "And because I have been so terribly frightened by the fact that it was your words in my mouth the day I turned away from Wynrick."

At her words, some of which he thought he surely must have imagined, the space between them became all but untenable to him. To her, it seemed crackling with possibility, like over-dried, fast-burning kindling wood.

Behind them, a knocking came to the chamber door that opened onto the sitting room. It was subtle, and hardly insistent, but in the silence both heard it.

Nell forcibly took her eyes away from Allan's, and without further speech began to walk toward the door. Once her back was to him, doubts again showered over her.

 _What if she could not do this? Could not bring off this 'making love', this meeting of the flesh necessarily elevated beyond the mere act of the familiarly physical?_  Down she looked over the precipice, as over she walked to the chamber's door. 

The precipice, a place she was finding she did not like hanging about near. So that was that. She did not merely fall--did not let gravity have its way. Rather, she entered the unknown with a well-sprung jump, by letting the door's barring beam quietly drop. Likely the party on the other side had not even heard it slide into its securing slot.

With the barring beam in place, she found the tremors in her extremities had ceased, making her path back toward the arch and the bed beyond it able to be more quickly traveled than before.

Allan-A-Dale was still on the bed, his expression somewhat more hopeful than it had been before, but also inquisitive about who had been at her door.

She made no answer to that question. "Yes," she accepted him simply. "I will. But slow." Her eyes did not look away from his. "And bare."

"Bare?" he asked, "wot?" his mind quick enough on the uptake, but somewhat stalled in the moment.

"Well, we've the time, haven't we?" she asked, her head to the side as though considering the logistics. "Just Allan, just Nell--alone, themselves, and finally, at making love?" 

Her face wore a veil of uncertainty, which he had not often perceived upon it. He gave a great, body-wracking exhale. "It will take me an hour ere I get you unlaced," he half-protested, his face already showing happiness in the pleasure granted, as well as that to come.

She smiled and laughed, moving over to let herself be caught by him where he still sat on the mattress edge, "I surely think," she assured him, her curled knuckles brushing at his sideburns, "the A-Dale fingers are known for being far more nimble than that. And any delay," she gave a wicked promise, "will surely prove worth the wait."

She took her fingers and set them to the determined loosening of the multiple lashings on his foppishly frilled, unfamiliar but appropriate-for-Court shirt. From where she stood, slightly bent over to manage this task, she let her hips swing from side to side, deliberately frustrating him in his attempts to get her elaborate and lengthy back lacings undone as quickly as possible.

In a fit of put-on exasperation, he grabbed her to him, with a surprising degree of force, stopping her in mid-motion, sending her heart straight up into her throat and snatching at her breath. His eyes and hers were again in close proximity. Their breath was upon one another.

"What if we're no good at it?" she asked, confessing her doubts. "Just as us? What if it comes about all wrong?"

"Don't worry, Love," he told her, swallowing back a more intimate--though possessive--form of tenderness, "I know exactly what I want to do with you."

To this she heard herself make a sound that was not quite intelligible, and certainly not at all maidenly.

His hands seeming to be in six places at once, he kissed her, and in response hidden parts of her flushed and spread like a vain peacock's tail unfurling, readying for a mating dance. 

She felt his hands stop in their unlacing and feel their way to cupping under her bum, in doing so clutching her back toward him, toward the target zone of his parted knees, by the closeness of the embrace causing them to break their kiss, his face now level with--and buried within--her still frocked bosom.

Forgiving him his short attention span, she moved her own hands back to where she knew he had stopped with the lacing, and managed to undo it the rest of the way, pulling the rich golden cording through the lacing loops until it fell, useless to the floor.

If she looked down she could see the top of his head, the half-curly shock of hair upon it. She brought her now unoccupied hands to it, stroking through it as though it were her own, letting a finger or two wander over to tease at an ear.

"I fully plan to worship every part and piece of you," he mumbled through lips still largely engaged with taking the measure of her still-clothed breasts.

"And I to see that you do," she assured him, her tone that of laughter, the over-sized bell-shape of the frock now untethered and ready to slip from her shoulders at her slightest movement.

She thought of his lips upon her, of how often she had worked to keep them--and his hands--free of her flesh. The uninvited (but never far away) fantasies of them from out of her mind. How in this moment she could only find the fabric that separated her from him a tease, a paper wrapping, or box on a present--meant to send you wild in anticipation, its sole use to be discarded (usually with some degree of violence: ripping, tearing) when the right time came. Her breasts seemed to want--of their own will--to burst forth through any open space in the weave of her frock, as though swelling as a way to  _get_  to him, to make contact with the suggestions his worshipful-as-promised lips whispered into them with increasingly compelling insistence.

She grew annoyed and impatient with the bindings of his shirt, his warm (at times tugging) mouth on her creating fractures in her concentration. She half-wanted to set her teeth to gnawing the troublesome bindings off. But before she had to act so drastically they came free, and feeling the liberation from them he pulled apart from her, lifting his arms to allow her to remove it.

The taking away of his hands upon her bum and his arms that had been tightly about her was all the encouragement the no-longer-fitted-to-her dress needed to slide off, down from her shoulders and onto the floor.

The sensation of the frock sliding off over her prickling-with-desire skin was like a half-ravishment. The exposed surface of her total flesh tingled in the open air. She found she did not immediately know what to do with her hands.

At her rather dramatic unclothing, she watched as his eyes reacted in surprise.

Allan-A-Dale had not expected such an unveiling. Perhaps a shoulder pulled down for a nibble there, a hem lifted to get at the meat of a leg--the possible options of how to remove Nell's frock for a while, perhaps, complicating their proceeding. To see a woman fully bare-- _and_  in adequate lighting to appreciate the view--was not a common occurrence. But then Nell, he had come to believe--not a common girl. Not to him.

"You wear no shift!" he exclaimed, underscoring his continued surprise at encountering her bared self quite so easily. His right hand tentatively extended to stroke the side curvature of her belly, the soft down there pricking up in aroused response.

She gave a small smile and a shrug. "At present it is not...fashionable...at Court to do so."

He was half at an angle in the looking up at her, his right hand on her their only connection for the moment. She found it was not enough for her, the contact was too tentative, too easily broken. She stepped closer, though there was little more than a full step's-length between them, brought her flesh into immediate proximity with that of his which was bared, surprised to feel heat in his skin where hers had felt so cool in its exposure.

Her hands re-discovered how best to behave. She was tired of standing, and it took them little more than a touch to push him onto his back among the bed's un-turned down coverlet, where she settled a knee into the mattress to crawl in beside him.

She had more than a passing familiarity with the myriad possible men's trouser closures--and how to untangle them--but found she, instead, preferred to watch as he managed that moment for himself. The nobility-fashionable trousers he wore had a foolish double lacing that joined slits down either side of where his legs met his torso, cupping his manhood like an emphasizing codpiece (not that A-Dale, actually, needed such self-enhancements). In most such moments he could have loosened the laces on a single side and managed, quite nicely, to see to the business at hand. But with quick fingers familiar to the task of his own lacings, he had both unstrung, raising his hips off the mattress in order to slough the trousers onto the floor's flagstones, keeping with his side of their bargain: bare.

She was at working on slow. Reaching toward him in the first moves toward a laying embrace, she brought her hand to his chest, where she felt markings--especially one near his heart--that spoke to her knowing mind of a particular breed of Nottingham violence.

"Did you get that one on account of Hood?" she asked him softly, her head upon the mattress, as though she feared she might spook him with the intimate question, her fingers brushing against the newly-discovered hurt--like fingers to a lute string--learning it, cataloging it as his. A story, a tale of him.

"Naw," he answered her, equally softly, taking her hand that caressed that spot in his, and bringing it to his lips, "quite the opposite, in fact. I shall tell you another time." 

As she let her thumb brush at the soft 'tache on his upper lip, she noticed he did not promise to 'spin her the yarn' of it, nor 'tell her the tale'--all fast-talking speech for crafting a story of lies and exaggerated flourishes.

He re-settled her hand about his neck, sliding himself toward her--the bed's frame shuddering under the movement so that she could not be certain it was not her own anticipatory tremulous flesh quaking as well--locking their bodies tightly together in passionate proximity without yet bringing them to fully joined. 

His skin sang to him that he was at touching her all over--that he not only was with her, present and in her company, as he had so often thought of being since that day in Sherwood, but that he was soon, in a way, to become her, and she him. That what was about to take place (for surely, at this point there was little short of unexpected, cold pails of thrown water or castle guards bursting in that could discontinue their journey to this moment's fruition--no matter how slowly that it was approached)--what was about to happen here was a true sharing, not simply an itch's scratching, a one-sided act of pleasure requiring a negligible partner. No, an act of togetherness. Of unity. Of belonging.

In a flash-bright moment of clarity he thought of what he would want to tell her, had he breath and the present ability to string together thoughts (which, save for this flash-moment he at present did not). He thought of a word--a word which in his life he had rarely ever used. He thought of it until he had to forcibly swallow back the saying of it.

He felt Nell's fingers at play among the furrow of muscles in his upper back as the kisses they exchanged became more frequent, their hands and mouths found time to travel over the maps of one another's flesh, each of their needs increasing in want, in insistence.

Again, from the other room he heard a knocking. Somewhat louder than before, but still respectfully so. It tugged even at his currently frenetic mind so that he pulled incrementally away from her.

Knowing what caused him to separate himself--even slightly--from this point in their now nearly combustible embrace, Nell assured him, her voice ragged, "ignore that. They'll go away. Just," she struggled for both presence of mind and breath, "ignore it."

"You're--" he began, and got no further in his question of her certainty. The green of her eyes blazed at him like unnatural mage's fire. "Now," she demanded, her fingertips once so light and questing upon his back now deliberate, firm, not to be ignored, " _Now!_ "

He took one of her wrists in his hand, and she let him bring it down, along with his own, to guide her to where their two hands--hers against his firm, yet tender self, his to the back of hers, joined as though merging into one--one thing to accomplish, one task in mind, one motion to achieve it.  _Together_.

The second hand of Allan-A-Dale found its way, there in the King's Castle, in the bed of the woman known as Arabel--a knight's courtesan, found its way again to Nell's bum, cupping it, and lifting at her hips slightly (as he felt her tilting them in welcome), until he felt her muscles swallow him in, those muscles deeply drinking, consuming that which they had made together--that which he could give to her. Drinking, pulling down, down, further, down. Until;  _together_.

 

* * *

  


As he would of any day, Allan-A-Dale lay awake at day's end, assessing the day's various gambles in his head, judging those that had worked out, had brought in a good return, against those that had fizzled--or even lost him his initial investment.

He gave a moment's thought to the candles, the fact that they needed snuffed, before he reminded himself he was in the King's own castle--conservation of candles not a concern. He would let them gut themselves out as they would.

The bed's coverlet (under which they had never found their way) was uncommonly bumpy against his back, but really, nothing for a Sherwood-dwelling outlaw to fret over. It was still by far leagues more comfortable than a forest tree root.

Nell-- _yes, he would say it-- his Nell_, was asleep, wrapped within his arms, peaceful as a babe at mother's bosom. Well, perhaps that metaphor would better serve him. For certainly he found himself uncommonly peaceful at present, and her bare self--satisfying bosom, soft as eiderdown, with a promising bounce and buoyancy--was easily accessible. 

It had not been as it was with a tavern-employed wench--a quick uncoupling and turning away shortly after (sometimes even mid- or pre-) climax, a trick employed to try and stave off unwanted babes. No, their time had peaked and slackened off, but still they had held their embrace, finding things to say, kisses still to give, even in the twilight of their lovemaking.

This had only served to strengthen in his mind his belief in the difference of this occasion, the matchlessness of it. He looked down at Nell where she slept. He gave a soundless scoff of disbelief.  _And she had doubted they could pull it off_. Doubted that they had (either between or within them) what it took to set about doing such a thing as making love. 

Well, he had proven her wrong on both counts, long-knowing that love (first seen through her knowing compassion) was something for which she had great capacity. Only surprising himself to find that he had heretofore unknown aptitude for it within himself as well.

Allan-A-Dale looked forward to sleep, to a long and eventful night--and wondered what his partner might think to the occasional waking, were it to prove a pleasurable one for both parties. Seeing how well the day's many gambles had paid out, perhaps in a few hours he would take the acceptable risk and find out.

Then again, perhaps he would find himself simply unable to pursue disturbing her. He did not know if she expected him to spend the night, to find his arms still draped about her when the morning came, his face buried in her scented hair, quiet happiness in his expression.

He looked forward to falling asleep in the midst of what--for lack of a better word in his vocabulary--he understood as perfection. But not, he found (no longer to his surprise), half so much as he looked forward to waking up beside her tomorrow.

After all, there was still the story to learn, of how she, a Nettlestone thief, had come to be here, billeted in the King's own castle, accoutered like a lady.

Ah, yes.  _Tomorrow_.

 **The End**

 


End file.
